Kyle Harrison

Senior Software Engineer

About Me

I'm extremely passionate about Software Development in all it's variations and frequently attend Tech Meetups, Conferences,
User groups, & Talks to discover more about the latest development principles, guidelines,
and techniques from industry experts and fellow developers.

Mostly importantly, I enjoy learning and building awesome software projects!

Latest Talks

Ever think to yourself that a better product or service must exist but you failed to find one? Solving a real problem
with technology can often be time-consuming. Yet building an MVP in a weekend is an achievable goal, when focusing only
on the core problem. In this presentation, I explore my solution to enjoying my comic book collection. using
open-source, and GraphQL.

Simplifying navigating the Python ecosystem for new developers. Standards vary between libraries, and commonly used libraries may not be the library a user expects. For this reason, during the hackathon, this project attempted to guide new developers through the Python ecosystem by
providing similar projects and dependencies that related to a given project.

Micropython runs on the bare metal, giving you a low-level Python operating system that
can be used to control all kinds of electronic projects. Now you can build all those
office and home hardware projects in your favourite language!

Latest Projects

The NI Tech Community is a gathering of people working in the tech and design fields
with an association to Northern Ireland. Student and individual's new to the community
were often sigh posted to multiple sources of information. The NITC site attempts
to consolidate multiple resources to help sign post the myriad of resources available.

Muxer is always looking for contributors. It's an open-source events aggregator build
using React and Python. Everyone is welcome to contribute and we have lots of first
timer issues for #hacktoberfest. Although if you don't see something you like and
can think of an improvement, code, documentation, feature, or something else we are
open to all ideas and incorporate almost all issues / PRs.

MoHugs is aimed at helping men form new social connections in an easy and practical way
by using a physical device located in common local spaces (like coffee shops) and
a website that allows men to engage with the service. It is a discrete service that
informs men of other sympathetic individuals located in the shared space that are
open to having a conversation and forming new social connections.

Belfast Cares is a charitable website promoting public engagement with local charities
and organizations within the Belfast area. The Belfast Cares team wanted to tackle
a real problem in the heart of the city center ensuring those most vulnerable in
our society continue to have access to the basic necessities such as toiletries,
food, and useful goods/items that we often take for granted.

Educating the public by providing useful information on how to engage with the homeless community & contact details of established
organizations/charities to volunteer & donate is vital to promoting individuals
to take action by looking beyond traditional money & clothing donations needed
to support local charities/organizations.

The eCommerce industry is undergoing a major phase of disruption led by the mobile revolution,
social media and pervasive Internet access. With the recent explosion of new web
technologies there has never been a better time to find innovative ways to improve
customer experience and engagement.

An android-based inventory manager App built with HTML5, CSS3 and JavaScript using Apache
Cordova. Evolving from the need to manage large collections of products in a intuitive
way the App focuses on making the process of searching and storing products as simple
as possible through the use of a barcode scanner.

An electronic environmental sensor, developed to collect and relay real-time data from
water reservoirs to a remote server. The Moptopus made headlines in 2013 across local
and national news on STV & BBC alongside winning awards in the European and World
championship 2013 iGEM competition.

An autonomous environmental controller designed for growing produce in a controlled environment
with minimal human intervention. The solution logged real time sensor data using
the Arduino microcontroller and web services to trigger email alerts in user defined
scenarios to visualises data points as graphs. The project received ‘Best use of
Yahoo technologies’.

Career

Integrated forecasting & reporting for businesses. Founded in 2014, Futrli supports over
40,000 businesses and 1,000 accountants in 130 countries through their 100% cloud-based
platform that helps small businesses make decisions and take actions that lead to success.

ShopKeep is a cloud-based iPad point of sale (POS) system. Founded in 2008, its POS system
is used by more than 23,000 small businesses, most of which are retail shops, coffee
shops, restaurants, and bars.

During my time at Chain Reaction Cycles I developed high profile features such as customisable
Gift Certificates
, Customer Stock Notification Emails, and preformed the Design/ Integration of Adobe
Scene7 Image viewer using Oracle's Commerce Framework.

The International Genetically Engineered Machine (iGEM) competition is a worldwide synthetic
biology competition. The Team Dundee project was based upon creating a biological and
hardware solution to removing a toxin from water reservoirs. The project achieved international
success by winning first prize in the International competition and made headlines on
BBC evening news.

Other Projects

BBC News Labs presented #newsHACK II - a news industry innovation event on 1st & 2nd May
2014. Following the success of #newsHACK in 2013 (in which the Dundee team also attended),
this event seen 30 teams made up of news organisation and academic institutions from
across the United Kingdom take part in a competition to prototype news experiences and
journalism tools of the future.